August Blogs

The August Photo of the Month is of me on a horse near Lake Tahoe, California. I went horseback riding near the town of Camp Richardson in July 2005. That was a good day!



Monday August 29, 2005
I went in for my surgery's follow-up doctor's appointment today, had the bandages removed, and heard the test results. Good news...

Not malignant.

I never really thought that it was, but until you hear the doctor say it, you don't know for sure.

There's still a little bleeding, and the left side of my chest looks pretty rough, but I should be plenty healthy to leave for Chicago Wednesday.

I'll be in Chi-town until Sunday, and I'm sure the hotel will have some sort of wireless connection. I'll keep the blog going while at the convention. Should be pretty neat 'cause everybody who's anybody in mystery and crime writing will be there.

Got some great pointers for places to go while in Chicago from my sister-in-law yesterday.

Well, keep the emails coming, folks, and thanks for your prayers. I love to hear from you!

Stacey





Sunday August 28, 2005
I have a couple pieces of good news to report today.

January Magazine is interested in publishing an interview I've conducted with Jennifer Colt. It sounds promising, and January is one of the most well-respected and longest lived sites for authors, books, and publishing on the web. I read an interesting profile interview there yesterday with author J.K. Rowling, right before her first book was made into film.

I'm just happy to have found a home for the interview and am honored that it's at such a well-respected place. I know Jennifer Colt is as talented as any new author I've read in five years. Check out her debut novel The Butcher of Beverly Hills; it is the funniest novel I've read in a long time (maybe ever). It really worked for me. I loved it!

The other piece of good news is just that I managed to realize a break-through with this Amber Page book cover that had been causing me some grief the past month or so. Briefly, one of the many challenges I faced was finding a way to do a cohesive wrap-around with matching colors on front, spine, and back cover. Lulu allows you to either upload two separate files for front and back cover, using their spine software, or to upload a full wrap-around as a pdf.

The trouble with doing a full wrap-around as a pdf, then comes with adding a bar code, which Lulu cannot do (as yet). You have to figure out how to get a bar code on the book yourself. This was a significant problem for me, but doing the full wrap-around was challenging for other reasons, too. I was unable to get a high enough resolution to keep the image and font from ghosting and blurring.

However, on Thursday I had a break-through using Macromedia Flash and a .png file of the front cover of the book. In a matter of less than 48 hours, I learned how to lay down a background color, manipulating literally an infinite number of colors and styles. I learned the CYMK color codes from Macromedia, then used those codes at Lulu for the spine. Furthermore, I could lay down the font for the front and back in MS Word (which uses the RGB color scale), convert to .pdf, save as a .png, then open the .png in Macromedia Flash, pinpoint the font color using Flash's tools to learn what the CYMK color code for the font was to match up the spine font color with the font color on the front and back of the book.

All of this is probably way too much technical info to interest most people, but the bottom line is that I now have a kick-ass cover whose color cohesively wraps around and which I can easily add a bar code to at Lulu. In other words, the cover's pretty much done. And it genuinely looks as good as (and maybe even better than) most books published with a traditional publisher, which was my goal right from the start. I did not want to release Amber Page unless I had a cover that equalled (or bettered) a traditional publisher. I still need to add cover blurbs, if I can get any, and the bar code, but that's just about it.

If you'd like to see the cover and aren't on a dial-up connection (or if you don't mind waiting a minute for it to load), click here to see the new Amber Page cover.

And finally, I'll be going into my doctor's office for a follow-up tomorrow and to get the bandages removed from my chest, which is so bruised over my heart it looks freakish. It reminds of that scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, where the guy gets his heart removed. That's what my chest looks like right now. Gross.

Then, I leave for Bouchercon, the largest mystery writers convention in the world, in three days. Wednesday.

Whew!

Stay cool, good people...

And send me your thoughts. I love to hear from you!



Thursday August 25, 2005
It's the day after surgery, and I'm doing pretty well. The pain is fairly minor, but I'm still having to move around slowly.

I may actually try to do some writing this afternoon.




Wednesday August 24, 2005
I had my surgery this morning. It was a success. I can not begin to describe what an emotional relief it is to have this thing out of my chest.

I'll probably look back on this in a year's time and wonder at how much I let the anxiety and fear get into my head over it. I first noticed this lump in my chest about three month's ago, and it has just been gnawing away at my mind ever since.

I think a big part of it is that I'm finally beginning to feel like I really have a grasp of the publishing business and that something big could break for me at any time and that I would know how to handle that kind of pressure.... then to have even the possibility of cancer become a reality, no matter how remote, just seems like such an unfair deal, that I've let it knock me around emotionally.

All of this is to say, this a weight off of my chest -- ha, ha -- like none other in my life.

I just want to do good work. I was put on this earth to write, to entertain, to live well -- maybe even to inspire -- and to love my wife.

I feel like I can get on with that, now.




Tuesday August 23, 2005
My surgery is tomorrow morning. I think the thing I'm looking forward to the least about it is that I have to wake up at like six o'clock A.M. I'm not a morning person:)

I'm told I'll be eating mostly soup for a day or two, so I took my wife out to eat tonight for a big juicy steak dinner at Outback Steakhouse in Mesa.

I think the thing I'm looking forward to the second least is just that I'll be out of commission for a day or two.

I have learned that if I don't write 2,000 words per day, every day I get miserably depressed.

Does this mean I'm driven?



Monday August 22, 2005
I'm in good spirits tonight. I went over to the fitness center this evening, put in 4.5 miles on the treadmill, lifted weights, had a good dinner (roast in a crockpot).

I've found over the years that when anxiety and depression start to creep in (and I've been feeling it more lately with this surgery coming up) that nothing breaks through it better than physical exercise, good food, good sleep, and to write well. But the exercise really helps...

So, I went to pre-op testing today. The surgery's going to take about an hour on Wednesday. They'll remove the mass from the left side of chest, and Susan's going to drive me home afterwards.

I should be at the house by noon, but I'm going to be moving slowly for a few days it sounds like.

I'm kind'a looking forward to it, now. Just to get it over with, and get on with my life.

I hate worrying about stuff.




Sunday August 21, 2005
Well, so I go in early tomorrow morning for pre-op testing for my surgery which is scheduled for Wednesday at 8:30 A.M. (MST).

There is something so weirdly frightening about surgery I can't even describe it. I think it's the realization that sooner or later, I will not be alive, and there ain't nothing I can do about it. We can live healthy and well, pray, exercise, not drink, not smoke, not cheat, and generally take care of ourselves, but eventually the end catches up with every last one of us...

How we find meaning in a life that ends with such resounding finitude is maybe the single greatest mystery facing humanity.

I read an interview with Philip K. Dick today that was done a few months before he died of a stroke on March 2, 1982. In the interview (which was conducted in June '81), he was so optimistic about the movie Blade Runner, which was due out in a few months. His whole long, sad, hard career was finally seeing the fruits of its labor and at the end of the interview Dick joked about some of the difficulties of having his novel adapted to film and of having to wear a tuxedo to the movie's premier:

"I was just destroyed at one point at the prospect of this awful thing that had happened to my work. I wouldn't go up there, I wouldn't talk to them, I wouldn't meet Ridley Scott. I was supposed to be wined and dined and everything, and I wouldn't go, I just wouldn't go. There was bad blood between us.

That David W. Peoples screenplay changed my attitude. He had been working on the third Star Wars film, Revenge of the Jedi. The Blade Runner people hired him away temporarily to do the script by showing him my novel

I'm now working very closely with the Ladd Company and, I'm on very good terms with them. In fact, that's one of the things that's worn me out. I've been so amped-up over Blade Runner I couldn't work on The Owl in Daylight.

I hear the film's going to have an old-fashioned gala premiere. It means I've got to buy -- or rent -- a black tuxedo, which I don't look forward to. That's not my style. I'm happier in a T-shirt."

He died before he got a chance to see that premier. It just seemed like his entire career was one where no one appreciated his work. He rarely made more than a couple thousand dollars per year, and some years it was far less than that. All total, since his death, movies adapted from his novels have grossed somewhere in the neighborhood of a half billion dollars worldwide.

The work was there all those years, but he was unable to get others to realize the value of his work during his lifetime.

Having written eight "best-seller"-styled novels that have not yet found publishers, I can't help but identify with him and his career. I mean, I have this body of work literally done, completed, edited for 2-3 years per novel, it's on my computer, and I look at it daily. I pray, "God, just help me to find a sympathetic editor." I need an editor. I need a sympathetic editor at a major publisher. This is what I need, now, more than ever in my career.

Maybe if I concentrated on the attributes I want to find in an editor, bring them up out of the subconscious into the my conscious, write them down, and start repeating them like a mantra daily. Maybe that would help to find that right, sympathetic editor.





Saturday August 20, 2005
I worked today for several hours on the cover for Amber Page and the Legend of the Coral Stone.

One of the many challenges I have is to realize a cover with a high enough resolution that the font doesn't appear to "ghost" and blur.

Today, I revised the back cover description. This description has been through a couple dozen drafts in the past few months. I think I've got it just about where I want it.

I still very much want to realize a full wrap-around cover, rather than three separate files for the front and back covers and the spine.

A wrap-around ends up looking more cohesive in the end, but it is much more difficult to do. You really have to work on these things in stages.

I basically just want to get the cover, now, within the next month, to a point where -- as a model -- I've gotten it laid out the way I want it. Then, I can turn the model over to Mimosa, who did the cover for The Kiribati Test, and she can take the model and make it look like a truly professional cover.

The final touch will come after that, when I set up an ISBN for the cover, generate a bar code and place it on the back. I'm not totally sure how I'm going to do that yet...

The bar code is what makes actually selling the book via Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble (and any other store, for that matter) possible.


P.S. I also revised the Amber Page Site, with a new template, new text graphics, a new author photo.... trying to make it tighter and more cohesive.



Friday August 19, 2005
I like cheese, in case you're interested. I just ate three slices of Cheddar and two of Pepper Jack. Mmm, mmm...

Crossed over the 600-page mark today in Dr. Plant.



Thursday August 18, 2005
What a difference a day makes.

I think you know you're a writer when you can come to a day feeling like crud, crank through 10-15 pages of writing anyways, and then feel like it was all worth it somehow.

It's like a medicine, writing is...

I'm approaching page 600 in manuscript form of Dr. Plant.




Wednesday August 17, 2005
I just want to say "Thanks" to everyone who reads this blog. The publishing business can be tough sometimes, and it helps to feel like you have a voice. I value your time.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please use the handy comment box at the top o' this page.

Let the good times roll. . .



Tuesday August 16, 2005
We ate at Joe's Real BBQ last night in Gilbert, AZ. Then, went out to see War of the Worlds afterwards...

I'll bet it would surprise most people to know that Gilbert is the fastest growing city in the United States.

It must be the Bar-B-Q.


Sunday August 14, 2005
It's a Sunday night, 9:17 PM, and I'm happy:)

Man, this is going to be a fun Fall...


Saturday August 13, 2005
I watched Ray on HBO tonight. I saw it in the theater when it first came out, then watched it again when Susan and I were up in Tahoe a few weeks ago.

The thing that really clicked in my mind the last time I saw it (and tonight) was how important it is to get out on the road.

In a lot of ways, the music business and the book publishing business are very similar. You produce an album or a book. You set a release date. You do everything you can to build hype before the release date, and then you get out there and tour.




Friday August 12, 2005
I wonder if there's some way I can legally adopt coffee...

You know like, "I'd like to make this jar of Folgers my son."

Wonder how that would work...


Thursday August 11, 2005
I wrote a scene today in Dr. Plant that may be one of the most satisfying fictional scenes I have ever written...

It was just plain fun.



Wednesday August 10, 2005
Had pizza for dinner tonight....



Tuesday August 9, 2005
I think I may have figured out a way around the recent website troubles...

The problem was that I had so much stuff on this one page that it crashed my server space.

So, I've backed up all the old stuff on an old blogger account over at this here joint.

Maybe what I'll do is I'll only run the most current blogs straight on this site, and at the bottom of the page, I'll post a link to the blogger.com blog, where I'll put every blog over a month old.

Might work....



Sunday August 7, 2005
I've had a massive site crash in the past 24 hours because I reached my 5MB memory capacity for this site...

So, I've had to upgrade to an all new system.

The new site will be going online (hopefully) within the next few days.

That said, there should be significant difficulties viewing this site for the next few days, and I apologize to everyone who regularly reads this blog.


Stacey



Saturday August 6, 2005
I would like to say a few words about the book publishing business because I know a few people who read this blog are writers themselves and may be interested in this kind of stuff.

Without a doubt the biggest question that young writers have is "How do I get published?"

This is not an easy question to answer because there are so many ways to get published.

Publishers in this country are broken down into (roughly) three main categories: 1) multi-national publishing conglomerates; 2) small press publishers; and 3) self-publishers.

University presses could be lumped together with "small press publishers" but they don't operate on quite the same financial principle and their motivations for publishing books are different.

At the top, you have multi-national publishing conglomerates -- publishers like Random House, Time/Warner, HarperCollins -- and these are the publishers who publish most writers that the general reading public is familiar with. They offer large financial advances to writers (from $10,000 on up to seven-figure deals), they print large numbers of books, and they distribute books widely. They actually have budgets for marketing and advertising (though, many writers often complain that it's not enough).

Let's just focus on those today.

Each major publisher has numerous imprints within their house, and imprints focus on particular genres. Within an imprint, there may be ten-twenty editors. There are only about ten major multi-national publishing conglomerates, but there are literally dozens of imprints (about 40 all total).

For example, HarperCollins is a major multi-national publishing conglomerate and some of its imprints include: Amistad Press, Avon, Cliff Street Books, Eco Press, Eos, HarperBusiness, HarperEntertainment, HarperResource, Harper San Francisco, Perennial, Perfectbound, Quill, Rayo, Regan Books, and William Morrow.

HarperCollins also has a Children's Book division that includes Avon, Greenwillow Books, HarperCollins Children's Books, Harper Festival, Harper Trophy, Joanna Cotler Books, Laura Garinger Books, and Tempest.

And like I said, at each of these imprints there are about ten editors. All total, in New York City, there are about 400 individual editors at major publishers.

Now, HarperCollins itself is a subdivision of a massive corporation called News Corporation, which is itself owned by Australia media giant Rupert Murdock.

All of the major publishers work in a similar fashion: Random House, Penguin Group Inc., Simon & Schuster, Time/Warner, etc.

At Penguin Group, Inc., for example, there are the imprints: Avery, Berkley Books Group, Bluehen Books, Dorling Kindersley, Dutton, Gotham Books, HP Books, Hudson Street Press, Jeremy P. Tarcher, New American Library/NAL, Penguin, Perigee Books, Plume, Portfolio, Price Stern Sloan, Prime Crime, Putnam, Riverhead Books, Viking, and Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers.

Some of these imprints are themselves broken into further divisions. For example, Berkley has the divisions Ace, Berkley Books, and Jove. All total under just the Berkley Books Group, they publish about 500 titles per year. And this, of course, is just one imprint of Penguin Group, Inc.

Now, here's a point that I should make. None of these major publishing conglomerates will even look at work from an unknown writer unless that writer is represented by a literary agent. They are just huge corporations, you see, and to get in the door you must first find a literary agent.

Literary agents are like sports agents -- we've all seen Jerry Maguire, right?:) -- they act on behalf of the writer in order to sell and negotiate with the publisher over the author's manuscript.

So, the logical first step -- some would call it the Holy Grail for unpublished authors -- is to find a literary agent who likes you, your work, and wants to represent you.

There are about 200 literary agencies in this country. Each agency has its own interests. Some are literally Mom & Pop organizations, and others are big slick New York City organizations that only deal with A-list clients. There are many others in between.

The key to finding the right literary agent is to find where you and your novel fit in. To do this, you need to learn about all the different literary agencies. The easiest way to do this is to read guide books like Jeff Herman's Guide that tells you about every literary agency, its interests and what it's had success with in the past. You can also go to writers conferences, where some agents will meet with and talk with unpublished authors. The most cost-effective way is to start with reading the guide books.

From there, you need to craft a one-page query letter that pitches you and your book to the literary agent, and you need to send that letter to the agent you think is best suited to represent your novel.

Without a doubt, one of the biggest things holding back most would-be-published authors is that they don't learn enough about the agents they're querying, and they send inappropriate material to places that have no interest in what they're sending them.

So, probably the best place to start if you want to get published is to buy a copy of one of the major guide books and to read it from front to back until the pages are curling up and falling out.

Then, craft a one-page query letter and send that out to all the agencies you think will like your book.


Thursday August 4, 2005
I'd like to say a word or two about bar codes. Bar codes are those little white boxes filled with black stripes on the backs of products, by which a cashier can scan a product to get a price on a register.

I've had to learn all about bar codes with the publication of The Kiribati Test and The Band, and particularly now with Amber Page and the Legend of the Coral Stone. It's very important to get a bar code on the back of a book, so that a store can readily sell it.

But what information does a bar code contain? What exactly happens when a cashier scans a bar code?

When a book has an ISBN assigned to it, a publisher can then generate a bar code. An ISBN is a thirteen-digit number (it used to be ten-digit until January 1 of this year) assigned to each specific book that acts like a fingerprint for that book. To cite isbn.org, an ISBN is a "unique machine-readable identification number, which marks any book unmistakably. For 30 years the ISBN has revolutionized the international book-trade. 159 countries and territories are officially ISBN members."

One thing I've had to do because I'm publishing independently is to apply for an ISBN. My publisher does this pretty easily for me, but it is an important step in producing a published book which customers can buy.

Once I get an ISBN, I have to generate a bar code. These are two different steps -- getting an ISBN and generating a bar code -- and there are a number of ways to generate a bar code for free via websites and computer software. As yet, I have not been able to do so. On both The Band and The Kiribati Test, my publisher automatically placed a bar code on those two books (which made it very easy), but with Amber Page because of the nature of its fully independently-produced cover, I've had to figure out how to get the bar code onto the back cover before uploading the whole book at my publisher.

It's tricky to do, and I want to make sure I do it right. The only way I can really check to know if the bar code I've placed on the back cover works is to actually carry a copy of the book into a store and ask them to scan it. If the bar code is unreadable, I have to try again from scratch.

Bar codes would definitely go under that classification "1,001 Things They Don't Have Time to Teach You in Creative Writing Courses but Which You Have to Understand in Order to Sell Books."

I teach one Creative Writing class online via Mesa Community College per year, which students can take from around the world. When I finally get a major publisher to publish one of my books, I think I am going to design an online course on The Business of Getting Published. Having a flawless, great novel is honestly only about 10% of getting published. Within the field of "getting-published" knowledge, there's another 90% that every writer who has ever gotten a major book deal has learned before getting a major book deal.

Most people just assume that you write a novel, and you get it published.

This is quite possibly one of the most frustrating misconceptions that would-be-published writers must learn. And usually it is no fun to learn it at all... You have to learn it though, if you're going to get a novel published. There is no other way.

I'm going to wait to place the bar code on the back cover until I absolutely know that the cover is otherwise finished.






Wednesday August 3, 2005
I went to bed last night at like 9:50 and woke up about 5:00 AM. I'm usually much more of a nightowl, so it was neat to get a good night's sleep like this and to wake a few minutes before sunrise.

We had a rainfall overnight here in the desert, and a thin line of clouds clung to the mountains a few miles north of my home in the sunrise. It was cool and damp this morning when I walked the dogs, and the desert smells earthy and rich after a good rainfall.

I've continued reading Jung's Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious [see blog entry dated July 16 below], and have made it to about page 300. The last section in the book "Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation" is absolutely brilliant, really the sum total of Jung's most important theories on the psyche.

To recap, Jung believed the human mind consisted of two parts: the conscious and the unconscious. Conscious thought is thought that you are readily aware of and which you control easily. Unconscious thought comes from some place deeper and he has two divisions here: personal unconscious and collective unconscious. The personal unconscious consists of all the experiences of your life (your memories) many of which are not consciously remembered but are in your brain nonetheless. The collective unconscious, on the other hand, is a whole other ball game.

Jung believed that the collective unconscious was some kind of binding force, a "substratum" he sometimes refers to it, which interconnects all people's minds. This is to say all people who have lived, all people who are living, and all people who will live. Jung believed that all this knowledge is there in our minds, in our collective unconscious.

The process of individuation is essentially a process by which a person aligns their unconscious (both personal and collective) together with the conscious parts of their minds to be "psychologically whole." Someone who is neurotic, psychotic, manic, or depressive has allowed the conscious and unconscious aspects of their minds to become unbalanced, to let one have dominance over the other. The two are meant to be in harmony, and when they play off of one another in harmony your mind can really guide you through life well.

In essence, the goal of individuation is to search deep within your unconscious (even the collective unconscious!) to discover who you actually are in this life, where you are supposed to be, and how you are supposed to live your life most fully.

He believed that every person has the ability to know why they are on this earth; we just have to search within us to find the answers.



Tuesday August 2, 2005
Life is not always biscuits and gravy. I try to keep an upbeat attitude on this blog, aiming to make you laugh and keep you informed, but I’ve got something I’ve got to say that ain't exactly joyful news and I’ve thought long and hard about how to say it (or whether I should say it at all).

About three months ago, I found a lump on my chest. It felt like a jelly bean under the skin on the left side of my chest. It scared me pretty badly, and I scheduled an appointment with my doctor. He immediately noticed what he called a “breast nodule” and ordered blood tests and a sonogram. He was concerned because of its proximity to my heart. The sonogram confirmed that I did have a mass in my chest, and my doctor wanted me to see a specialist and surgeon.

I went to see the specialist, and he looked at the sonogram, did a physical exam, and recommended surgery to remove the mass.

Yesterday, I scheduled the surgery. The date for the surgery is Wednesday August 24th. It’s most likely a pretty minor thing, but they want to get it removed from my chest so that they can examine it to make certain that it’s not malignant.

So, that’s the news; no big deal...

We'll get this thing knocked out, and I'll get on with my life.






Monday August 1, 2005
Bloggity smoggit...

Is it August already?

Criminy!